A node between the physical and digital.
The rants and raves of Simon Wardley.
Industry and technology mapper, business strategist, destroyer of undeserved value. "I like ducks, they're fowl but not through choice"

Thursday, December 14, 2006

This and that ...

I met up with an old friend recently, we chewed the fat for a bit. By the end of the evening we had covered a reasonable range of subjects.

There are a bunch of concepts which I've talked about and debated on for the last decade, they came up in the conversation - so I thought I'd put a note here.

Problems exist on a fuzzy scale between static and dynamic. There is no single methodology to managing such, but rather opposing methodologies.

Knowledge evolves through the same fuzzy scale.

Commoditisation of IT is not only inevitable but desirable.

Leadership is a highly malleable concept that changes with precedent, environment and culture.

Politics in the western world is increasingly exhausted, trivialised and without vision.

There is an image of conspiracies controlled by men in smoked filled rooms. However some of these would appear to be controlled by emergent behaviours of the crowd.

Q. Is someone plotting against us? A. YesQ. Who?A. You are.Q. Are we?A. Yes, you're just not aware of it.

Open source is more than a licensing model.

The environment should not be treated as a tradeable and exclusive good.

3D printing (in terms of printed structure and printed electronics) is a disruptive technology which will commoditise the manufacturing process allowing for distributed manufacturing. AKA, the next industrial revolution.

Content will increasingly be valued through self organising processes rather than managed ones.

As information flow accelerates within society then patents will increasingly become a disabler rather than an enabler of innovation.

Market economics is a tool not a purpose.

Different funding mechanisms are required for IT, taking into consideration the different stages of technology in terms of CODB, Transitional and CA. This is principally what I call the "cheap as cheaps" vs "worth based development" methods.